Mary Beard writes "A Don's Life" reporting on both the modern and the ancient world. Subscribe to a feed of this Times Online blog at http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/rss.xml

October 31, 2012

Most of us have forgotten (or never noticed) that we have elections coming up for our "local" police and crime commissioners on November 15. I have never honestly been convinced that the election of a (well paid) P&CC will do much for the democratic deficit in policing policy.

In fact -- problems though there may have been with the old local Police Authorities, now being abolished -- they seemed quite democratic enough for me. The majority of members after all were elected councillors, and the fact that they were a group of people rather than an individual meant that they could easily represent different interest groups within the local community, and different areas within the authority.

Besides, I'm not sure I like the idea of my Chief Constable being sackable by a single elected official (as the info websites seem to imply, but I can't quite believe is true). And I am fairly certain that we shall not be paying any less for the new "men" (and they will mostly be men) at the top. Look, for example, what is happening in Devon and Cornwall, where there has already been a c£50k a year job advertised for a media manager for the lucky new P&CC.

Anyway, my choices now are between a) vote for one of the candidates in Cambridgeshire; b) spoil my ballot paper (on the grounds that women should always vote in some form, to give thanks to those who gave us the vote); or c) just tear it up when it comes through the door.

The local candidates, I have to say, are not a particularly inspiring bunch.

October 28, 2012

One side benefit of having young kids is that you sometimes have to do something else other than work at the weekend. That may be a rather rosy-tinted view of time management with toddlers and a job -- but there is something to be said for being forced to load the nippers into a car at the weekend and take them out to see something improving/fun (for a start, it means that you get to see it too).

Once that stage has gone, for me at any rate, weekends get entirely taken up with work just like any other day of the week -- unless you have someone to stay. And then you can go out to see "something improving/fun" again. Which is what we have just done, with our South Sudanese friend Samuel, who is here to stay.

In fact we have gone to the local stately home, Wimpole, which has a Home Farm and Rare Breeds Centre where we often used to go with the kids 20 years or so ago.

Now the last time I went to a local National Trust stately home (Ickworth...I'm not including Roman Chedworth here), I was pretty incandescent; and said so pretty frankly on the blog (I couldnt stand the faked up kitchens). So credit where credit is due, let me say that Wimpole Hall was almost faultless in touristic terms.

It's a great house, partly done over by John Soane in the late eighteenth century -- and he put in the most wonderful plunge bath (above, the view from the bath!) and a stunning "Yellow Drawing Room". They'd be worth the trip on their own (built for the filthy rich or not, they are ace).

But more than that, the whole display got it just right. These I reckon were the touristic/heritage plus points:

1) There weren't any "dont sit on the chair" signs. When they didn't want you to sit down on something, they had just put a bit of pot pourri (vel sim) on the chair, and you got the message.

2) In the great Yellow Drawing Room -- the Soane bit -- the ceiling and dome are fantastic, but you do need to look up. So there were some rough old cushions on the floor, and you could lie down and do just that. No messing, no signs saying "lie down here".. again, you saw the cushions and got the point.

3) In the Long Gallery -- used as a ballroom -- there was music. You heard it as you approached, and rather assumed it was piped. Actually when you arrived there was someone playing the piano, real live.

4) The volunteers in the rooms were all spot on, by which I mean they knew their stuff and quckly recognised when you knew yours. I cant bear going to those places (and the National Trust can be bad at this) where you ask about some image of (say) Artemis on the wall, and you get treated to the pre-prepared lecture on ancient gods and goddesses being different from "our" God. You can't be nasty and say "Look sunshine, this is what I did my PhD on", so you shut up and get to feel crosser and crosser. At Wimpole, none of the volunteers treated us to a lecture on what we knew about, and all were helpful on what we didnt.

5) When we got upstairs to a room about the history of the house, they had printed out, and bound, some of the key articles on the place from Apollo and the Burlington Magazine etc, so you could sit down and read. OK, someone might in theory have walked off with them -- but in practice who would (and so what)?

6) Most of the stuff in the now regulation "downstairs" area also appeared to be from the house itself. As I said, the thing that really riled me about Ickworth was that most of the kitchen stuff on display to reconstruct the authentic atmosphere seemed to have been bought off ebay. That was true of some of the kitchen display at Wimpole (I dont believe that the last occupants left the packet of Lux flakes behind). But there were some surprising bona fide items. We looked suspiciously at a large pile of suitcases, but indeed they did carry the label of Elsie Bambridge (the last, pre National Trust owner).

Pretty much full marks I thought. The attached Home Farm was a bit of a different story, however -- but also with its definite plus points.

October 24, 2012

I am in Brussels for a week, grading ERC fellowship applications. Do not for a minute imagine that this is a glamorous jaunt, enlivened by evenings of moules frites and Belgian beer. The working day "at the office" (above) is 8.30 to 6.30 ish, and the evening is spent in the hotel room doing the prep for the next day, with a room-service pizza or lasagne. Haven't been within a spitting distance of a restaurant since I arrived (though we are all going to a dinner at the Crowne Plaza tonight for a "social" -- €37 each, including two glasses on wine each, if you want to know the details of ERC hospitality and uprightness: it's no gravy train).

Anyway, this regime has given me ample opportunity to reflect on what I carry with me. Leaving aside the tootbrush and a couple of spare pairs of leggings and tights, it's all electronic AND TANGLES OF FLEXES.

I've got the laptop, and the mobile phone, a camera (in case I want to immortalise the "social") and a kindle (in the unlikely event of having five minutes to spend with Hilary Mantel). OK, none of that is too bulky, but each one has to have its flex and plug into the eletricity source, or its battery charger. And each one needs an adaptor to a Euro-style socket. (And I dont know if anyone else has noticed this, but euro adaptors come in two slighty different sizes, with slightly thicker or thinner prongs -- and the slightly thicker ones can be next to impossible to jam into slightly thinnner sockets. Result: to be on the safe side you need more adaptors than you think.)

Anyway, what this means is the my hotel room is filled with plastic all over the floor, and my shoulder back carries half of it to and from the office each day.

October 21, 2012

I caught a snatch of Any Questions yesterday; someone (I think it might have been Sally Bercow) was saying words to the effect of "transparency is always a good thing" -- presumably in the context of whether Prince Charles's letters to government ministers should be made public.

I am not sure what I think about that partcular teaser. My gut reaction is to think that even people in power ought to be able to write things to each other that aren't automatically made public. If they cant write it down for fear of disclosure, they'll do exactly the same business on the phone or over dinner and then no evidence will be left and no-one will ever know.

But what really struck me was how people get fixated on the "right to know", at the expense of much bigger and more important questions. If we are going to have a king -- then I guess I'm prepared to let him, when heir to the the throne, write to government ministers privately. I'd much rather that people got worked up about whether we should have a king at all, or at least whether the structures of the monarchy as now defined deliver to us what we want. Just knowing what he wrote doesn't make a blind bit of difference to that big issue. You'd never actually be able to pin any decision to his influence anyway.

I've fought for disclosure on all kinds of things, and information that the powers that be think we cant be trusted with. And just after the final Hillsborough revelations, it's probably a bad time to be writing this. But, unfashionable as it is to say, we do appear to have forgotten that sometimes not knowing things can actually be useful. Some things are usefully confidential.

It always strikes me at this time of year, when the uni applications for next year have come in. In days gone by (presumably back in the Dark Ages before the data-protection act), the school references for candidates were confidential, between the head and the university; the kids didnt get access to them. Now they are entirely open to both the applicant and their parents. And they are much less useful in the selection process, for obvious reasons.

I know all the good motves for the change (apart from the long arm of the data protection act). The relationship between pupil and school should be such that nothing that is said should come as a surprise to the applicant. If there are mistakes in the reference, then it is only right that the kid should be able to correct it. Etc etc. In fact, when I got my job aged almost 30, back in my old college, one of the first things I did was rummage through the old files and dig out my head teacher's reference.

October 17, 2012

I have been spending every spare moment that I have (and there aren't many, I promise you) trying to get the first draft of my Roman laughter book finished. I have done the most difficult bit -- that is writing about the theory and method of studying Roman laughter. When I did the lectures on which the book is based, I didnt do very much on that kind of stuff, or rather I dropped it in from time to time, rather than treating it in any systematic way. There is nothing worse than going to a series of lectures and finding that in Lecture One the lecturer draws his or her breath and tell you all about the methodological underpinnings and problems of what they are about to do... but you, the listener, dont yet know what that is.

That's fine for lectures, but not I think for the-book-of-the-lectures. Laughter is a particularly tricky area in history. It's history's final frontier in a way...raising in the acutest form I can imagine all those basic issues of historical knowledge, the familiarity/difference of people in the past etc. So you can't just shelve all that -- and, even if you're writing about the Romans, you can't simply duck all those questions about what Aristotle did or didn't mean when he wrote about laughter (I mean some Romans read a lot of Aristotle and whatever he had to say was part of Roman culture, as well as Greek). And that takes you into another vast bibliography . . .

But the rhetorical problems in the book still have something in common with the rhetorical problems of the lectures. Does the reader really want to sit down and slog through a load of theoretical prolegomena before they actually meet a Roman laughing? Of course they don't. So I've spent a long time trying to integrate some important (well, I think it's important) theory and method into some good and compelling Roman examples. In fact I start from a wonderful story where the historian Dio is sitting in the Colosseum and the emperor Commodus (who is playing at being a gladiator and beast hunter) comes over and waves the head of a decapitated ostrich at the senators, as if to say "you next". Dio explains that he can hardly stop himself laughing, but knows that would be dangerous... so he plucks a leaf from the wreath on his head and chews on it.

October 11, 2012

I mentioned in my last post that we had read a bit of Juvenal Satires 10 (Johnson's "The Vanity of Human Wishes") in our Cheltenham Festival gig. The whole idea of the Satire is to question what really matters in the world, and to ask how far standard human aspirations (power, wealth etc) are worth aspiring to. It now turns out that it was all a bit more relevant to our own times than we might have thought.

The section we concentrated on was about the very nasty henchman of the emperor Tiberius, Sejanus . . . it's here in Latin from line 56, and here in English.

Juvenal's "joke" is about the fall of Sejanus and the way his statue was pulled down when he was overturned -- a nice bronze work of art, destroyed by the revolutionary people, melted down and turned into frying pans and piss pots. As Llew said, Juvenal is great here, in mixing up the high and low language: the great epic statue and its language is turned into the language and vessels of the street (Sejanus becomes a matella or a sartago... a pot and a frying pan).

But, as Llew also pointed out, Juvenal is being more complicated. Because, as Juvenal says in the poem, Sejanus whose statue was being gleefully pulled down, had been worshipped by the very people who were now destroying him (adoratum populo). So, in a way, Juvenal's joke is on us.. because "we" (that is the Roman people) were those who elevated the guy, with our misplaced adoration, in the first place.

And that is where it gets us with Savile. We are guilty of exactly what Juvenal points at: the very people who stupidly elevated him are now dragging him down.

October 10, 2012

Last weekend, I hoofed it to Cheltenham Literary Festival. The prime objective was to be junior partner, with Peter Stothard and Llew Morgan, in the third of our "How to read a Latin poem" gigs at the festival... and by Latin, I mean Latin, in Latin.

This year we did an epigram of Martial and a couple of passages of Juvenal (from Satires 3 and 10). And, let's brag a bit, we had a full house of 330 people, actually enjoying the real Latin -- and they were of all ages from 15- to 75+. Quite a lot of people said they were coming back to Latin after 30 years or so.

That was in the morning. In the evening, I had a fun discussion with Natalie Haynes about classics, blogging and All in a Don's Day; then a discussion about "What is a University For?" Why, oh why, do politicians who should know better -- Lord Adonis in this case -- always kick off with a bit of Oxbridge bashing, as if there were only two universities in this country, and then move on to brag about their own achievements (in Adonis's case it was the "Teach First"scheme, which I much admired until it was sound bited into the discussion with minimal relevance at every possible opportunity, then tweeted... counter suggestible, moi?)

But between Juvenal and talking to Natalie, Llewelyn and I zoomed out with one of the generous National Trust
curators to have a fresh look at Chedworth Roman Villa. I had been there moons ago (I think the last time was c. 1973) and sort of remembered the Victorian museum in the centre of the site and the supposed water shrine just outside the main building area. But it had recently been done up, and (unusually with these things) done up for the better.

October 05, 2012

Yesterday evening I had a party for all the 20 or so Classics students at Newnham, undergraduates and grads (and a few fellows). We had some nice glasses of prosecco and orange juice, and a good chat... and I came home after a couple of hours to think about how the class of 2012 was different from the class of 1984. (Don't worry ladies, I'm not going to embarrass you..!)

It's easy to dump on the students of 2012 versus those of "our" generation (whenever than might be). And it's true that there are differences and downsides. Many of them, for example, have had a lot less time than we had to work out about how you learn on your own. People my age remember having loads of free periods to work in the library when we were 16 or so. Whether that's better than doing PSE, and whether we really did use the time to read rather than have a quick fag behind the bike shed, I am not sure -- but there was the beginning of a sense of independent learning and time management in our apparently free time, and it was a good prepraration for uni.

But it wasn't that which struck me as we caroused (modestly) last night. I came home thinking how much had changed in 25 years (despite what you hear about how Oxbridge is stuck in the past). For a start, we now have in college a much more mixed undergraduate and graduate community. At the party we had 4 grads there -- doing Masters courses and PhD's. 30 years ago, when I did my PhD, we grads were pretty much invisible, perhaps one every other year. The community was really an undergrad affair.

October 01, 2012

As a woman who is rather down on rowimg (it tends to keep good students on the river and away from their books...), I am surprised that I have just bought two bits of Cambridge rowing memorabilia (or are they?)/

At our favourite local auction house last weekend, we had spotted two rather pretty mahogany chairs, each one painted with the logo of "St John's College Rowing Club", plus the name of the cox, dates 1896 and 1897, and on one the triumphant phrase "bumped Kings".

We reckoned they would go for a bit more money than we had, so didn't put in a bid. But on Sunday night we discovered they had not been sold, so bought them for the reserve price. (OK £400 was still more than we had, but it was the husband's birthday (which we had hardly celebrated ) and I had just got a little royalty cheque -- so why not, eh?)

They are now installed in the front room, and very handsome they are.

But the two (three counting the son) historians in this house are puzzled, if not downright
suspicious, about the historicity of this pair. Why?